ADAM Weinstein says Climate change deniers should be “arrested”. He says so on Gawker:

We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths.

Contributing to deaths seems to include creating pollution, as the picture by his story implies.

He adds:

Attempts to deceive the public on climate change, and to consequently block any public policy to tackle it, contribute to roughly 150,000 deaths a year already…

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can…

There is a lot we can do societally, now, not just in terms of reducing our contributions to the global climate’s maladies but in terms of preparing for its effects: rising seas and temperatures. Changes in crops and food supplies. Increased population density and disease. There is a chance to make society safer and smarter.

A journalist who says free speech should be clamped down on, that people who challenge a popular view should be arrested, does not understand the hard won freedoms that allow him to write. Freedom of speech and of the press are indivisible liberties.

The next time a Gawker writer claims that they are radicals, rebels or freedom fighters, remind them that one of their own demanded that free thought be quashed by the State.

Weinstein adds:

…if you are actively trying to deny people the tools they need to inform themselves, to protect themselves against a scientifically proven threat to life and limb, you shouldn’t be part of the debate. You should be punished for your self-serving malice.

Got that? If you say the unsayable and go against the all-powerful scientists whose word must be unchallenged fact and law you should not be heard. That’s the direct opposite of what should happen. You should be part of the debate. And that debate should be open and free. The science should be challenged.

Weinstein’s illiberal call is fundamentally conservative, his another voice demanding we believe in man-made climate change or else. His view is presented as radical but it anything but. He seeks to ratchet up fear of humanity. He wants thought limited, aspiration capped and desire to fulfil human potential stymied. He wants no liberty of intellectual endeavour. He wants errant scientists, journalists and publishers punished.

Orwell observed “that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all”.

Last month, Mr. Weinstein, 30, received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. Later this month, he is to become a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal. He graduated from Columbia. He is the son of Anne C. Weinstein and Alan Weinstein of Lauderhill, Fla. His father is the president and owner of a yacht brokerage and service company in Oakland Park, Fla., bearing his name.

You may have read about Alan in Power & Motor yacht magazine.

Do engines create pollution? Is dad the man? Is dad an “idiot”? Are his gassy exhausts chocking the planet and causing seas to rise? Did they pay for Adam to go to college? Dad’s site tells us:

With the purchase of Cantieri Riva by Vickers PLC (Rolls Royce), Alan Weinstein Assoc., Inc. became the US importer of Riva spare parts & accessories and served as the US service department for Cantieri Riva Inc, a division of Rolls Royce Motorcars.